Let us borrow for a second from the methodology of Roy Hodgson and apply an analogy to the space monkey story he told his England players at Wembley on Tuesday.

It comes from a book called The Human Stain by one of the Three Lions manager’s favourite authors, Philip Roth.

In its early pages, a long-serving college professor called Coleman Silk becomes exasperated by the consistent absence of two students at his lectures.

“Does anyone know these people?” Silk asks the rest of the class. “Do they exist or are they spooks?”

It turns out that, unbeknown to Silk, the two missing students are black.

They quickly learn of what Silk has said and allege that, rather than suggesting they were ghosts, he had used the word as a racial insult.

Roth uses the episode to help to illustrate the absurdity of the ‘purity binge’ sweeping America at the time of Bill Clinton’s encounter with Monica Lewinsky.

And maybe, as the flash flood about his half-time team talk rages around him, Hodgson will take some comfort from those words.

Because, there appears to be an absurdity about the space monkey story and the idea that Hodgson might have intended it as a racial slur.

Stan Collymore and John Barnes both pointed out that if we have got to the point where the mere use of the word ‘monkey’ in any context in the presence of black or mixed race players causes offence, then we have reached a sorry pass.

They are right, even though neither seemed to be aware there are differences in the accounts of how Hodgson introduced the reference to a monkey after the first half of the England-Poland game.

Not many managers would tell a convoluted joke about space monkeys and astronauts to illustrate a tactical point during half-time of a crunch qualifying game.

But it’s entirely in character that Hodgson would.

The bitter irony in the furore that has occurred over the joke is that, at its core, it was intended to make the point that Andros Townsend was having another superb game.

(Image: The FA/Getty)

The irony is that the joke poked fun at human beings and mocked them for being inferior to the monkeys in charge of the spacecraft.

The point, I think, is that essentially it was about the tendency of human beings to over-complicate things.